Why this year’s ‘Chicago Dyke March’ matters to Jews
Last month’s Chicago Dyke March exposed the true face of “inclusion” among “progressives.” The Chicago-based newspaper Windy City Times reported that “the Dyke March Collective ejected three people carrying Jewish Pride flags (a rainbow flag with a Star of David in the center).” According to the paper, “One Dyke March Collective member asked by Windy City Times for a response, said the... flags ‘made people feel unsafe,’ that the march was ‘anti-Zionist’ and ‘pro-Palestinian.’”
Another ejected participant, Eleanor Shoshany Anderson, lamented, “I felt that, as a Jew, I am not welcome here.” Indeed, Jews are not welcome among progressives. Increasingly, Jews are not welcome anywhere, and for a very good reason.
When Abraham noticed that his townspeople at Ur of the Chaldeans, Babylon, were growing apart, it troubled him. Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, Midrash Rabbah and other texts detail how Abraham began to question why people were growing unhappy.
Following intense scrutiny, Abraham realized that all of reality maintains its stability through the balance between two opposite elements: giving and receiving, altruism and egoism. The only exception is humanity. People, Abraham learned, are selfish to the core, or as the Torah put it: “The inclination of a man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21).
To balance man’s selfishness, Abraham developed a correction method that enabled people to rise above their hatred and thereby install the positive element that exists everywhere except among humans. Yet, Abraham’s discovery did not please his king, Nimrod, who tried to kill him. When Nimrod failed, he expelled Abraham from Babylon. As Abraham proceeded toward what was to become the Land of Israel, he wrote books about his method and taught anyone who wanted to learn the method of unity.
Back in Babylon, people grew increasingly apart until the empire disintegrated. The book Pirkei De Rabbi Eliezer (Chapter 24) describes this process from the viewpoint of the builders of the Tower of Babel: “If a man fell and died, they would not pay him any mind,” according to the book. “But if a brick fell, they would sit and wail, ‘Woe unto us; when will another come in its place?’” As their alienation escalated into hatred, they “wanted to speak to one another but did not know each other’s language. What did they do? Each took his sword and they fought each other to the death. Indeed, half the world was slaughtered there, and from there they scattered all over the world.”
Mishneh Torah writes that Abraham bequeathed his knowledge to his son, Isaac, who bequeathed it to Jacob. Jacob, in turn, taught his son, Joseph, who united his brothers around him and they flourished in the land of Egypt.
Yet, after Joseph’s demise, the Hebrews wanted to abandon the method of correction of the ego and assimilate among the Egyptians. “When Joseph died,” writes the Midrash (Shemot Rabbah), the Hebrews said, “Let us be as the Egyptians. Because they did so, the Lord turned the love that the Egyptians held for them into hatred.”
Apparently, the persecution of the Jews did not begin because the Egyptians suddenly became Jew-haters. It began because the Jews themselves had turned against Joseph’s path of unity and strove to become like the Egyptians: selfish and self-centered.
When Israel escaped from Egypt, they established their nationhood by pledging to unite “as one man with one heart.” But to guarantee that they would not forget their duty to convey the method of correction to the entire world, the nascent nation was immediately tasked with being “a light unto nations.”
To this day, the world remembers that we owe it its correction, its unity. Just last weekend, another antisemitic act reminded us of this, as vandals covered a Holocaust memorial site with a sheet carrying the inscription, “Heebs [Hebrews] will not divide us.”
Notorious antisemite Henry Ford recognized the role of the Jews toward society in his book The International Jew – The World’s Foremost Problem: “It is not forgotten that certain promises were made to them regarding their position in the world, and it is held that these prophecies will be fulfilled. The future of the Jew is intimately bound up with the future of this planet.”
Until approximately the ruin of the Second Temple, we managed to overcome our many conflicts and held on to our method of correction. But approximately two millennia ago, hatred prevailed and separated us entirely. This is why our sages do not attribute our exile and the ruin of the Temple to external enemies, but rather to unfounded hatred among us.
With our ruin, the world has lost its hope of healing human egoism. In search of a remedy for humanity’s self-centered nature, humanity has adopted and abandoned every ideology and form of governance. Yet, all have failed because until we balance our egoism with unity, the former will always take over. Consequently, every governance and ideology are bound to become fascism or Nazism, or both.
In search of unity, people conceive all sorts of notions. They hold marches that celebrate inclusion, but they exclude the Jews because the division among Jews is the reason why they cannot stand each other in the first place. Subconsciously, they are telling us: “Leave us and unite among yourselves! This is what we need from you!”
In 1929, Dr. Kurt Fleischer, leader of the Liberals in the Berlin Jewish Community Assembly, stated, “Antisemitism is the scourge that God has sent us in order to lead us together and weld us together.” How tragic it is that the Jews back then did not follow through on this observation.
Today, I think we must unite regardless of our mutual dislike. It should already be clear to us that our hatred of each other incites the world against us. However liberal and open-minded, no one will embrace us unless we first embrace each other and become “a light unto nations.”
Midrash Rabbah writes, “This nation, world peace lies within it” (Beresheet Rabbah, 66). And in his book Orot (Lights), the Rav Kook wrote, “The construction of the world... requires the construction of the Israeli nation. The construction of the nation and the revealing of its spirit [of unity] are one and the same, and it is one with the construction of the world, which is crumbling in anticipation for a force full of unity and sublimity.”
Indeed, our acceptance among the nations depends entirely on our willingness to be a light of unity unto all nations.
The author is a PhD in philosophy and Kabbalah and an MSc in medical bio-cybernetics. He is a prolific author with millions of students worldwide.